It seems pretty apparent that nobody really likes counting calories. Actually weighing out your food and then adding things up can get pretty tedious pretty quickly. I don't think actually accounting for each and every calorie that goes into you is necessary for weight loss.
That being said, however, the only thing that determines how much fat you lose (or gain) is the difference between the amount of calories you eat and those that you burn. So, you need to at least be aware of calories.
Generally, when we think about calories we generally don't do a very good job at estimating with them. People will consistently underestimate how many calories they eat, while also overestimating the amount of calories they are burning with exercise.
For example, today at work I played basketball for about an hour. I was breathing pretty hard and considered it quite a workout. At my current weight this probably burned about 630 calories. Not too shabby! But it can very easily be undone by unaware eating.
Coming home from work, I noticed that groceries had been purchased in my house and there was a new bag of cookies in the cupboard. Most of the time in the evening I have some light popcorn as a snack (about 160 cals worth) but today I got an extra workout in, so I deserve something extra, right? That is a very easy mindset to get into whenever we are presented with an opportunity to eat shortly before or after working out.
Looking at the back of the cookie bag, the calorie count is 160 cals for 2 cookies. I know myself, and realize that there's no way I'm only going to have two, four would be much more likely. That's 320 calories, and isn't an ice cold glass of milk the perfect accompaniment? That'll be another 160 cals or so added on. Total so far is 480 calories, and all of a sudden a very large portion of my workout has been undone.
There's nothing wrong with having an evening snack, even cookies sometimes, but always be aware of how quickly those calories can add up on you. Having a ballpark idea of what the calorie count of certain types of food as well as what an exercise session can burn is very helpful. I like to use the website FatSecret to reference these facts. They even have a mobile app that works quite well.
How much attention do you pay to calories in vs calories out?
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